mac mini – unable to use shaders?

Using a brand-new mac mini (not the new intel one) with the ATI Radeon
9200, none of the shaders seem to work. I get errors saying "Cg not
supported" or something similar (sorry, don’t have the machine anymore,
long story). The same goes for all for all of the example shaders I
tried. Is it true that the mac mini video cards don’t support OpenGL
shaders? The card seems to be really similar to the one in my old
powerbook G4 here, where everything works very well. Has anyone else
had similar experiences? This is really disappointing, I wonder if
there’s a hardware hack to enable shader support?

> It figures… too bad!
>
> FWIW, it looks like the new Mac Mini has an even worse GPU. Intel
> should be barred from releasing GPUs. How can a company that is so
> good at making processing chips make such crappy video chips??

It’s not crappy. It’s aiming for a balance of price, size, power
consumption and features which fills a particular niche in the
marketplace. Specifically, more emphasis has been put on video
playback, which fits the Mini’s target market well. This is not a
gaming machine.

Despite that, the specs are not too bad. What’s interesting is that
it has fragment shader support, but all vertex processing is done in
software. Makes sense given the video emphasis. Here’s some info
from the Mac OpenGL list.